Roberto Armenteros

History of Science

Agriculture, essential step in human progress

If by progress we mean development, growth, or a steady improvement of a society in terms

of capacity to survive through the years, then the human history has been a long tale of progress.

The radical version offered by Professor Diamond on how we should view the past, which

suggests that agriculture was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered,

contradicts the basis of our existence today and hence should be considered a very precipitate

proposal. It is true that with agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease

and despotism; but it is also true that thanks to agriculture the growing human race found an

unlimited source of food that enabled man to ensure his existence in this planet.

In the Paleolithic life ways, food collecting and hunting were the main source of food for people,

therefore food was very restricted. During that period of time, people had to be constantly

moving from place to place following the migration pattern of animals and the seasons of different

plants. They would remain in an area as long as they could find enough collectible resources to

live and as soon as they consumed most of these resources they would be forced to move to

another area. As time progressed, the human population as well as the demand of food was

growing and the available land was becoming smaller. This arising problem became a great

obstacle for the human kind whose only way of survival required a vast amount of inhabited land.

This new obstacle was severe enough to put an end to the human race in case a solution was

not found. In their quest for survival, people would have fought among themselves for a piece of

land and the resources would have been so limited that hunger would have become a major killer.

Fortunately, by the Neolithic period, people found a new way of survival, horticulture, which would

then grow to become full-fledged agriculture in the urban revolution. This transition was inevitable.

The inexorable pressure of population against dwindling resources led to increasing dependence

on farming. From this point on, no longer did families have to live independently from each other

moving from place to place looking for food. Human groups settled down in permanent villages

in various places around the world. By living together they could produce their own food, which

was a more complete food-producing way of life. Now man was a more powerful species, less

vulnerable to the threats of nature. This is a very strong reason why agriculture should be considered

the single most important step toward human progress and not the curse of its existence.

Agriculture not only offered a new way of food production, but it also domesticated man. In this

new era, many people began to live in self-sufficient villages, and families were united into tribes. This

brought issues like privacy, hospitality and the necessity to learn how to deal with one another. By 3000 B.C.

thousands of agrarian villages, about a day of walk from each other, dotted the Near East. More powerful

social structures developed, introducing regional crossroads and trading centers. This gave humans greater

control over nature, a more stable economy and ended up replacing the wild by the domestic.

After analyzing the great improvements agriculture offered to the human race it should be clear that "yes"

humans have progressed since 3,000 B.C.E. and that agriculture itself was responsible of this progress.

Bringing men together and creating a more reliable way of survival should be more than enough reasons to

disproof Diamond's radical vision. Civilization did bring negative things like diseases to the human kind,

but it also brought the cure of a great number of them as the knowledge of science grew stronger and man

started to understand nature. Unfortunately, along with this civilization came the social and sexual inequality.

For the last decades in many nations these differences have decreased tremendously and eventually will

be insignificant. Without the great improvements agriculture provided, the human race would have been

limited to live like regular animals, completely dependent on nature and fighting among themselves to be

able to eat. Or even worse, humans would have disappeared just like dinosaurs did.